The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

Purpose of this study was to explore the possible relationship between children's perceptions of reading and their reading achievement. (Author)

In a study that examined the conditions that were likely to facilitate error detection, it was hypothesized that poor readers' comprehension monitoring abilities would improve if they were given assistance in selecting the appropriate schema for understanding a passage. When the hypothesis was tested with 20 sixth grade students in an error…

Examines the relationships among accuracy and latency of word recognition and comprehension by nonfluent readers and whether component letter or holistic processing was used in word recognition by these same readers. (HOD)

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

The preliterate child must acquire from reading instruction at least the following skills: (a) appropriate scanning behavior, (b) letter and word recognition, (c) letter-sound generalizations, and (d) comprehension of written materials, at least to the degree that the reader can comprehend the same message when received aurally. Almost all modern…

Intended for administrators and policymakers as well as teachers, this digest explores the nature of students' metacomprehension, or their awareness of their own understanding, and the implications of this awareness for reading instruction. After defining metacomprehension, the digest discusses why this awareness is important to the learning…

Examines some recent ERIC materials on comprehension processes and on how teachers can improve students' awareness of comprehension or metacomprehension. (HOD)

The methods of reading instruction used and the emphasis given reading within the total elementary school program depend on the attitudes of the school administrators and the teaching personnel. While reading is commonly defined as a decoding process, it is actually a complex process of word recognition, comprehension, critical or evaluative…

To determine how procedural instructions comprised of text and pictures are comprehended and executed, a research review focused on (1) differences in comprehension and performance attributable to variations in the information's organization, (2) the format of the information, (3) the metacognitive strategies employed by the readers, and (4) the…

Twenty-eight fourth graders, categorized as having high or low conceptual awareness, were used in this study to examine the effect of conceptual background on overt reading behavior; to compare overt reading behavior to post-reading performance; to analyze the relationship between overt reading behavior and cloze test behavior and performance; to…

Structural reading difficulty of argumentative prose (text with an underlying message or superordinate principle), is related to the reader's approach to reading and learning. Ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education, were divided into three groups, based on their own descriptions of reading and learning: deep…

Reading in the writing classroom can be defined as a cluster of arbitrary categories, each with its own effect on the reading/writing process. Given this definition, it can be said that (1) perceptions significantly affect both reading and writing, (2) attitudes are factors in reading and writing, (3) rhetorical triangles are useful in teaching…

This paper reviews some of the strategies the receiver uses in the process of comprehending a message in a foreign language and discusses some of the ways in which the listener/reader goes beyond the actual physical form of the message during this process. The role of guessing is discussed in the context of the following theories: the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's development of syntactic aspects of reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the individual and the text in the comprehension and retention…